Philips DVP642 DVD player brings MPEG4 to the masses

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Company: Philips USA
Product: DVP642
Price: $64.94 USD (free ground shipping)

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WHAT better way to contradict Bill Gates' gloomy predictions about the Death of the DVD than reviewing a very affordable DVD player. This one is able to play almost every file you throw at it, including MPEG1, MPEG2 (.MPG) and AVI video clips encoded in the popular MPEG4 format (with the proprietary codec DivX or the open source Xvid codec). You know, the kind of videos often posted on the web and shared on Peer-to-Peer networks (National Geographic kind of material, I'm told). The Phillips DVP642 quickly won a large following by its low price and hefty feature set, including component video output, NTSC and PAL selectable output signal, and the possibility of making it region free just by entering a sequence of commands on the remote. Oops, the MPAA tells me I was not supposed to say this.

The Philips DVP642 vs my old Apex 600a

The Philips DVP642 is one of the company's most affordable entries in its DVD players product line -I bought mine from Amazon.com U.S. for $66 dollars, shipped within continental USA for free-. Those in Euro-land that are not comfortable with ordering from America or who are not happy using a 110v device with a power converter should probably take a look at the more expensive DVP762 which is sold by Amazon UK and apparently shares many of the features of the DVP642, with a flash memory reader slot as a bonus.

For those of you anywhere else in the world with a USA-based mail forwarding address who also happen to be good with a soldering iron, let me tell you that the DVP642's switching power supply can be easily turned into a multi-voltage one. Yes, we the hardware hackers almost always get things our way.

The Philips DVP642 over a 20-inch Philips CRT TV.
It seems Philips uses a single mould for TV and DVD remotes (DVD one on the left)

What's so special?
This player was one of the first units sporting the "DivX certified" logo by Divx Networks. Supposedly this guarantees perfect playback of DivX-encoded files (mpeg4). But as you will find later in the section "the ugly" this is not always the case because there's one special DivX compression option dubbed "QPEL" that is not supported by the DVP642. Regardless of this, it's safe to say that if you are not into downloading full-length movies from Peer-to-Peer networks, the small clips you can download from web pages (the funny clips that fill your mailbox and those "National Geographic" educational videos once again!) is often NOT encoded using this troubling option, so those play back fine on the DVP642. Plus, the content that you encode yourself into DivX (mpeg4) format will playback just fine -as long as you don't enable "QPEL" on the divx encoder.

If you have a TV with "component video" inputs, getting a cv-cable is a MUST to experience the best image possible, even in an old CRT

For the geeks that want to know the internals, the DVP642 is based on the popular ESS Vibratto II dvd decoding chipset (ES6698F), this chipset family is used by JVC</>, LG and Samsung combo DVD/VHS players.

You can see a good summary of the player's features on this forum thread, and also on the product's official site. Let's start with a list of the supported media and formats: the DVP642 can play content on CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW. What kind of files? I successfully played MP3 files at various bit rates, viewed JPG photos burned to cd-r and dvd-r, and played VCDs and .avi MPEG4 files burned to dvd-r.

When you insert a "normal" DVD movie, it works as any other dvd player. When you insert "a recorded disc" of any kind (CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW) it displays a basic but workable "file browser" that lets you select files to play or see (in case those were .jpg pictures). Both MPEG1 and MPEG2 compressed files are supported along with .ASF and .AVI files encoded with the following codecs: Divx (versions 3.11/4.x/5.x), XVid, ISO MPEG4.

There are unconfirmed reports about it also playing .vob files ripped from DVD and saved to DVD-R discs in "data disc" mode as well. I didn't test the "divx subtitles" feature (where the video is on one .avi file, and subtitles are in a separate file that the user can select to play or not. Another feature not tested in this review is whether this unit is macrovision-free or not. According to some user reports, this model is macrovision-free. But knowing Macrovision's strong-arm tactics, I wouldn't be so sure, and I doubt Philips would even think of risking it.

The cd file-browsing interface

Of course, let's not forget the main use for a player: play DVD movies that you buy or rent, and DVDs that record yourself with DVD-R or DVD+R burners. In that category alone, the Philips DVP642 is an excellent progressive scan DVD player. Specially when compared and contrasted to my ancient and expensive ($250 at the time) hacker-friendly Apex 600a - bought back in 2000 and which to this day has trouble reading the "new" recordable dvd recordable formats like DVD-R.

The Good
1. Firmware can be EASILY updated by just burning the update files on a CD-R disc and inserting it into the player. My player, manufactured in May 2004 according to the back sticker, originally included firmware version "0409" (April 9), and within minutes I had downloaded the latest firmware from Philips.com, which at the time was version "0531" (May 31), and updated the unit by burning the three firmware files to a CD-R disc and placing it into the player. To check the firmware version in your player press Eject, then 5-6-9 on the remote, and finally the "OK" button. There it is, the "version information" in your tv. The latest firmware version is dated "1109".
2. Supports PAL and NTSC output, can easily by made region free. You're not supposed to know this, but there is no need to "hack" the firmware. Entering a code on the remote, lets you switch the player's region at will. I simply set it to region "zero" and it played all region 1, region 2, and region 4 DVD discs that I threw at it.
3. Component Output is much, much clearer than s-video!. If all you want is region-free dvd playback, this is one superb progressive scan DVD player with component output (which separates colours and sends Red, Green and Blue over separate shielded cables. Even if you don't use the MPEG1/2/4/Divx/MP3 file playback often, it's a nice set of extras to have in there, at no additional price.
4. Very compact, slim design.
5. Just being able to save MPEG1 and MPEG2 file to recordable media as a "data disc" without having to do the "VCD" or "DVD compliant" dance saves lots of time and effort.
6. When browsing CD/DVD contents (on data discs) an icon is shown next to each file, for example MPEG1 files are shown with the "VCD" logo, DivX 3.1 and ASF files are shown with the "Windows Media" logo, and the like. Makes browsing and selecting files lots easier. That is, if you have any idea of what you are looking for.

The Bad
1. The firmware is not updated very often, just every few months. I've tried three firmware versions since I purchased this player, and some of the small annoyances (like the lack of 1.5x zoom) in some avi/mpg files remain.
2. Depending on the media used, there is a slightly annoying "chirping noise" when reading CD-R and DVD-R. Not a big deal but some people apparently find this important. I suspect that a dual optics might improve this but this often comes at an extra price. Some cheap DVD-R media is ejected on the first read and you must re-load the disc to get it recognized.
3. The "zoom" feature always works for DVD (even with the useful 1.5x mode to view wide screen movies without black bars on non-wide TV sets), but the same feature doesn't always work for avi/divx files. And when it works, sometimes 1.5x is not available. Case in point: while playing back a wide screen DivX encoded version of the movie "Labyrinth", -I own the movie on vhs-, I could only select 1x or 2x, not 1.5x. On other avi or mpg files zoom is not even available (you press the zoom button in the remote, but the dvp642 displays the "hand" icon indicating the function is not available).
4. The power supply is 110v-only for the US version, not multi-voltage which seems to be the norm these days. Get your 220-110v transformer ready, or get a soldering iron, lots of patience, and Google for the answer.

The Ugly
1. About 99% of the divx, mpg and ASF files that I tried played fine. Some MPG files appeared too blocky, but I guess it comes down to low resolution clips encoded for the web, then maximized to fit the screen. One particular DIVX movie did not, showing the error message "Codec not supported (QPEL)". If you have lots of "QPEL" encoded DivX files, -which are quite rare- you will have to re-encode those files without QPEL or check out the Philips DVP-720 instead, which according to unconfirmed sources does play QPEL encoded content, but costs much more. A hefty 109 GBP at Amazon.co.uk to be exact. Caveat emptor: I was not able to confirm QPEL compatibility in that player. There is a thread about this QPEL compatibility issue here.

When asked about the issue of DivX certification of this and other players without QPEL support, Thomas Huntington from DivX Networks told The Inquirer: "The reason why we don't support Qpel in the DivX Certified spec is that there is very, very little bang (i.e. compression quality) for the buck (i.e. MIPS). It is a nice feature that our advanced users enjoy, but at the end of the day it is not economically feasible for chip makers to support it and it does not effect the compression or legal quality in a significant way. Qpel is indeed a cpu-intensive motion detection algorithm. So much so that it requires a whole different silicon architecture to handle. There just aren't enough free MIPS to do it in firmware".

In case you're wondering what QPEL stands for, it's "Quarter Pixel", and here are the ugly little details from DivX Network's codec manager: "Our codec tries to reduce the amount of data required to store a frame of video by comparing it to adjacent frames in the movie. One way of reducing data is to divide the picture up into a grid of blocks and then match blocks in the current frame to areas of the picture in an adjacent frame (e.g. the previous frame). This is called motion estimation - because essentially what we are doing is searching for how a block has moved from frame to frame. By storing the motion of parts of the image we can recreate a lot of each new frame just by copying parts of the previous frame into the right place in the picture. This means we don't have to store all of the picture data for every single frame, and that saves a lot of space".

He ends the explanation by saying: "When we are actually searching for where a block in the current frame matches an area of the picture in the previous frame, we can search to various degrees of accuracy. Imagine taking a square from the current frame, and moving it around little by little over the previous frame until we find a good match. If we moved the block one pixel up, down, left, or right one pixel at a time, this would be a whole-pel search. By default, our codec actually moves the block around half a pixel at a time while searching for better accuracy, which is called "half-pel" search. When QPel is enabled, we actually search for matches by moving the block around one quarter of a pixel at a time, which is accurate and produces sharp pictures". So there you have.

2. When browsing the contents of a data disc (CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+-R/RW) the filenames are shortened to the first 11 characters (8.3, we've heard of it!). My guess is that royalties to the Vole might be involved if the companies want to include 'Joliet' long filename support. I can live with 8.3 names, but others might find this annoying.

The Verdict
I asked my friends for help and tested this player with near 25 cd-r and a handful dvd-r discs full of assorted video files. In the end it turned out that a single disc was not playable on this device, and that was a QPEL-encoded DivX file. So, considering the price, I give this player 4.0 Fernandos in my personal one-to-five personal rating scale. It has plenty of room for improvement and is far from perfect, specially considering the shortened filenames displayed on the file browser. One hopes that firmware updates (or third party hacks) might address this issue.

At the current price of less than $70 USD greenbacks a piece (~£34), including ground shipping within continental USA, you have no excuse not to buy a mpeg4 compatible DVD player like this, specially if you consider it a feature that does not carry a price premium. Of course Bill Gates would prefer you not to buy this player and instead purchase a $160 XBox console, or to subscribe to some DRM-enabled, Windows-centric subscription service, and then pay through the nose every month to get access to your leased content. It's your choice. I think the DVP642 makes DVD players very very alive. µ